yes is not easy because is wrote in sosho (cursive) and yes, it can be different person by person.my opinion, based on my research on internet is that characters can be WA (harmony) and KI (mind - spirit) (from right to left).if you search on google those characters in sosho style, they are not incredibly different than hose on the kakejiku.mu hope is to find anybody more expert in shodo that my researches on internet

Fireflower, those are some good guesses! I suppose I could see the left character as 気, but the one on the right... well, it seems a stretch to call it 和 (there's an example of a sousho version at this deviant art site).

In particular, the 'floating' marks on the top of the character on the right are unusual. They sort of remind me of 心. It's very.... different.

I'm definitely not an expert in sousho, nor am I an expert in calligraphy skills...

I don't read or speak Japanese but as a Mandarin speaker there is of course the crossover with kanji. So, instantly, the character on the left occurred to my mind as qi4/氣, but the character on the right....wow, I don't know. My wife is Taiwanese and took a look. She instantly said the character on the left is likely qi4/氣 but both of us couldn't guess the right character. She said it does not look like 和 to her, even following the strokes. I agree that the floating marks are in some way reminiscent of xin1/心 but that doesn't entirely seem to fit either. One way to search in these moments is to try to identify the character radicals and search words that have those radicals as a basis. For instance, xin1/心 is a component in many characters (忠，愛，etc.). A site that is very handy for this is zhongwen.com for Mandarin and it could help with Japanese, but the site is a Mandarin site that lists, visually, long strings of radical/character derivations. I don't know what the Japanese equivalent of cao3xie2/草寫 (grass style) is but this style definitely seems to be the Japanese equivalent. Is "sosho" the Japanese for "caoxie"? I'll look at some radical charts that I have and see if anything else comes to mind.

TeaArt, many thanks, great to have a sanity check. I agree with what you mean, that it's not quite fitting 心. It's almost as if the three upper marks on the left are part of a left radical, and the other upper mark on the right is part of a right radical.

In any case, you're correct, the Japanese term is sousho (or sosho, with the first 'o' being long). Usually 草書.

Hrm, I think that 気 is the simplified version of 氣. A number of kanji have simplified forms (for example, 国 is the simplified version of 國).

Again, I'm not an expert, so it would be nice to have confirmation. From what I've read, the Chinese have simplified more characters than the Japanese have (but then again, the Chinese language has many more characters than Japanese's common set of ~1900 characters).

another thing, i do not know if can hel, who sold me the kakejiku told me that it mean "fighting for your goal".i think that this translation does not fit with zen and chado (this kakejiku probably it was in a tearoom), but maybe.....in any case, if the left character is "ki" the right one should be something connected to him and also to chado, maybe this can help to find some ispiration